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Tucked into this home tour of a Delaware split level, Homie Heather B offered up a gem of a great idea for your kitchen.
In our previous apartment, my husband Nate was using a sideboard as his dresser. We refinished it black and liquid-nailed a butcher block top from Ikea onto it, and BAM it created extra storage and counter space in the kitchen.
You could use a sideboard or an actual dresser, or for smaller kitchens, a (tall) bedside table. The best part is all the drawers for extra storage!
The tenth Doctor really pulls the room together, does he not?
One of my favorite episodes too! I plan on naming a daughter after Captain Adelaide Brook.
I was gifted a couple of (actually really fancy) bedside tables when I moved into an unfurnished flat a few years ago. They served stacked on top of each other in the kitchen all that year. These days they sit side-by-side with a coffee table top joining them together so that my wardrobe can stack on top of them – using all the available vertical space in my tiny bedroom.
In my first college apartment we repurposed an old entertainment center console into extra kitchen storage. The spot for the TV was great for too tall items (college apartments have notoriously short shelves). Then I installed hooks on the sides to hang aprons, towels, and our soda can returnables bag.
I was desperate for an island, but $400 was waaaaaay out of my budget. So, I converted an old dresser. I painted it to match my cabinets and found a piece of marble that matched my countertops. Voila! I’ve gotten lots of compliments on it, and nobody has been the wiser. It only cost me $50!
The problem is… where can you find tall bedside tables!?! I have been searching for something the height of a desk (~30″ I think?) to go beside our fairly tall bed setup, and for the life of my I can’t find anything suitable. It would preferably have a drawer and/or a shelf in it, intead of just being a table, but even so! ARGH!
You may find it helps to expand your definition of “table”. I had a really great nightstand that was really a bookshelf.
Just because a furniture item is designed for one room, it doesn’t mean it can’t be re-purposed in a different location. For instance, in apartments that lack shelving space, a solid wood bookcase can easily double as a storage unit for dry goods, or even small kitchen appliances. Plus you can use the bookshelf sides to hang items like aprons or pot holders.
I have Billy Bookcases with doors on them in my kitchen along a wall where there isn’t enough floorspace for full depth cabinets. I use them for a pantry and all my baking supplies and they work perfectly. The shelves aren’t too deep that things get lost and I can adjust and add or remove shelving to fit as much of whatever I need to without wasting any vertical space. I also stack baskets on top of them with odds and ends inside!
Out kitchen is quite large in square-footage, but low on counter/cabinet storage space. We solved the problem by repurposing an oddly-shaped desk that my sister-in-law had when she lived with her folks. It’s one of those “straight but designed to fit in corners” styles, so it’s shaped rather similarly to a rupee from the Zelda games. It fits nicely in the middle of the kitchen as an island, and we use the underside for keeping the garbage can out of the way, and also some extra storage for bigger items like cat litter and big packages of paper towels.